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Beware Smartphone Lurkers: Cloud Storage File Remnants

The researchers said they’d expected to find “that smartphone devices will retain data from these storage services,” but didn’t know to what extent any leftover “artifacts” might include recoverable information. So they studied three popular cloud storage service apps running on the iPhone and on an HTC Desire running the Android operating system.

Here’s what they found: “Using mobile forensic toolkits, data can be recovered from a smartphone device which has accessed a cloud storage service,” they said. “The results from the experiment have shown that it is possible to recover files from the Dropbox, Box and SugarSync services using smartphone devices.” In addition, artifacts left by those services’ mobile apps in some cases allowed the researchers to gain a “proxy view” of files not stored on the device, but stored by the cloud service.